Defense Minister Amir Peretz said Friday that he objects to the decision allowing conjugal visits for Yigal Amir, the jailed assassin of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin.

The Labor leader responded to Israel Prison Service's decision last month that it would permit Amir to have conjugal visits, saying that there should be no concessions for the killer of an Israeli premier.

The prison service is following the recommendation of the Shin Bet security service. Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin said Friday, in response to a petition Amir filed with the Tel Aviv District Court on Wednesday, that the conjugal visits do not pose a security risk.

	Advertisement

The Shin Bet did not, however, conclude that Amir himself no longer posed a security risk or that he had moderated his views, Israel Radio reported.

Amir, who is serving a life sentence without parole for the 1995 assassination of Rabin, married Larisa Trimbobler by proxy in 2004. He fought for, and eventually won, legal recognition of the marriage.

In Amir's petition to the court, he said the fertility treatments that the Israel Prison Service approved for Trimbobler, an immigrant from the former Soviet Union and a divorced mother of four, could have negative long-term effects on her health.

The prison service announced in March that Amir is allowed to provide sperm samples for the artificial insemination of his wife, after rejecting the couple's demands to be allowed conjugal visits on the grounds that he could use them to pass political messages to his supporters.

"It is incumbent on the state to prevent this despicable and vile murderer from enjoying the privileges granted to other prison inmates, as the murder was committed against the State of Israel and Israeli democracy," Yossi Lahmani, director of the Rabin Center, said earlier this year.

But civil liberties experts have sided with Amir, noting that marriage and child-rearing is a basic right enjoyed by other convicted murderers in Israel, including Arabs jailed for violent attacks.

"If we live in a democratic and liberal country, then even a murderer must be considered a human being," Avi Saguy, a professor at Bar-Ilan University, has said. "The state cannot deprive him of something so fundamental to his humanity."